Engaging the Question of Palestine in Philip Roth's The Counterlife

Authors

  • Saddik Gohar

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes2000.9.1.2

Keywords:

Arabic-English Studies

Abstract

The paper argues that in Philip Roth’s novel, The Counterlife (1988), which engages the question of Palestine, the author’s attempt to introduce a balanced view of the Arab-Israeli conflict is undermined by a narrative strategy that favors the victor and deprives the victim from entering the text except as a non-person or a decadent oriental. An application of what Edward Said calls “contrapuntal reading” to Roth’s text reveals that the author’s tendency to offer a neutral presentation of the Middle East issue is thwarted by a hegemonic master narrative - originated in Orientalism and Western imperialism - that either removes the Palestinian subaltern out of the fictional text or conflates him with a status of cultural inferiority and barbarism by assigning him a role which conforms to his image in the colonial taxonomy of inferior races..

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Date of Publication

2008-01-01

How to Cite

Gohar, S. (2008). Engaging the Question of Palestine in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, 9(1), 21–36. https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes2000.9.1.2

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